


Explosure Therapy

by nic_takes_Ls (nic_L)



Series: The Bombs In Your Head & How To Make Them Stop [1]
Category: DreamSMP, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: 'Villain' Wilbur Soot, (But not straight up evil- that's not fun), All other characters asides from Wilbur are mostly mentioned, Angst, Canon Compliant- but added context, Claustrophobia, Explosions, Gen, Insomnia, Mental Instability, No Villain Wilbur Soot, Not Beta Read- we take L's, Panic Attacks, Pogtopia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Manberg Festival, Wilbur Soot Angst, Wilbur Soot Needs a Hug, Wilbur Soot is Not Insane, Wilbur Soot-centric, Wilbur tries to get over his PTSD by exposure and it is not a good idea, and also, l'manberg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:08:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27208666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nic_L/pseuds/nic_takes_Ls
Summary: Oh, that’s right. His head is very noisy recently.  The bombs like to whisper now, over their constant roaring and it’s actually rather polite, their helpful ideas. Wilbur’s begun to feel a bit like a fuse himself, slowly burning, running out of time before he himself goes up in flames. He wonders if he can find a way to protect Tommy before he does.Wilbur wraps his arms around himself and shudders.“I’ve got to blow it up.”
Series: The Bombs In Your Head & How To Make Them Stop [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015807
Comments: 24
Kudos: 234





	Explosure Therapy

**Author's Note:**

> uhh-
> 
> yeah
> 
> I really did not expect to have my first fic on this site be-
> 
> This?
> 
> But here you go.
> 
> (Also thank you to ExistentialFish for basically giving me a bunch of motivation woo)

Wilbur slams his axe into the wood before him and it topples. The woods are gentle and bright today, and the smaller branches of the trees bow in the wind that dances through the forest. His coat and hat are lain on a rock a few feet away, he likes the breeze blowing through his thin white shirt and fluffing up his ruffled collar. He picks up the load of wood in his arms and turns to head back to L’Manberg, where Tubbo and Fundy are still waiting for more wood to expand the Prime Path. There’s quite a bit of land to cover, and to repair. He sees the flag from where he stands and his heart leaps as it billows proudly over their home, their home that they fought for and won.

Then there’s a hiss from behind and Wilbur drops the wood and wheels around, breath stuttering and hands reaching for a sword, but it’s too late, and the creeper detonates and he’s knocked back and shuddering. He raises him hands to his ears and oh- The explosions echo in his ears and he remembers- but he doesn’t want to. Oh, he doesn’t want to remember the bombs and the fire and the smoke and the explosion bellowing through his ears as they like to still do.

He stays like that, kneeled prone and exposed. There could be an axe slamming down on his neck and he wouldn’t know it. Eventually the roaring in his ears die down, still there, they’ve been there ever since Dream set off the fucking bombs, but they’re being quiet now. Wilbur stands, knees trembling, but it’s all good and quiet now, isn’t it?

He makes his way back home after chopping down another tree, wood piled in his arms and coat hanging on his shoulders now, hiding the bruises starting to show on his back from slamming into the ground. Wilbur didn’t even know they were there.

* * *

A few days later, awaiting the outcome of the elections, he’s mining in a small cave until he disturbs a patch of gravel and it falls behind him, walling him in. Wilbur drops his torch to extinguish on the floor and his head blurs at the sudden smallness of the room. He is panting and all he can hear is _‘Never meant to be’s’_ by the time he digs out of the gravel.

* * *

Pogtopia is a hole. It is a hole in the ground, a hole in the side of a hill, and this hole is filled with small, dark corners that leave Wilbur choking on air. There are tunnels that gape back at Wilbur when he gapes at them, and there are lanterns that swing with a phantom breeze. They’re large enough that eventually, one falls in front of Wilbur’s feet with a shatter of glass and a flame dancing on the oiled glass. Wilbur falls to his knees and covers his ears. Anything loud enough makes Wilbur forget where he is and those pesky little bombs in his head go off. They’re quite loud, though somehow Tommy and Technoblade don’t hear them. As he lies there, arms digging into shards of glass, the roaring in his ears seem to be-

Calling him, if that makes sense. If that doesn’t make sense either, he supposes.

But yes, their hissing rises into a fever pitch and want there to be explosions out here. Not in his head.

‘ _Shut up_ ,’ he wants to shout back, ‘ _W_ _hat good will that do?_ ’

What good can that _(can I?)_ do? Wilbur’s mind whispers- the soft lilt of something as of yet unidentifiable.

Then there’s a gleeful shout, Tommy’s of course. Wilbur stands from his crouch and brushes the knees of his pants off. The shattered lantern is left in a corner.

  
  
“Tubbo’s got Schlatt wrapped around his finger, or apparently so. Gogy doesn’t show his face, and Quackity hasn’t got a clue.” His face is a brilliant grin, the biggest Wilbur’s seen ever since the two of them had stood in shock-still silent horror at the deconstruction of their walls. Ever since-

  
  
Wilbur blinks and shelves that memory away for a time where he won’t fall to pieces and a phantom pain of an arrow pierces his chest.

  
  
So, anyways. Tommy’s face was so eased and happy after seeing his best friend, bottle-blue eyes glittering and loose in expression, that Wilbur felt his own eyes crinkle in affection.

  
  
The hissing between his ears reminds him he didn’t trust Tubbo anymore.

“So Tubbo’s doing all right then,” Wilbur walks past Tommy’s practically bouncing figure, down the unrailed stairway into the hole in the ground. “He’s... happy, in Manberg.”

  
  
He hears Tommy’s steps falter and then pause and stops in return, still facing away.

  
  
“ _L’_ Manberg. And. Well. Tubbo’s- he’s.” He stutters and can’t finish the sentence.

  
  
“Hmm.” Wilbur turns back to Tommy and winces as he seems that previously smiling face is crumpled in a frown. Those bitter lines are visible around his mouth again and the rumbling in Wilbur’s head quiets, letting him think clearer. He hold out a hand in an unnoticed apology. “He’s doing what he can.”

  
  
Tommy’s smile perks up a bit and his hand is taken in a warm, grounding grip.

  
  
“He really is, isn’t he?”

  
  
Tommy tells Wilbur whatever else, mission related or not, Tubbo and him had discussed, babbling only a faint murmur of warmth in Wilbur’s head of explosives. They slip inside an idea, a concept- a truth?

  
  
_Does he even want L’Manberg back? Is Schlatt even a villain?_

* * *

Wilbur doesn’t get much sleep anymore. He smiles and tells Tommy and Techno he’s going to bed, then sits in the corner of his room on the floor. Because if he goes to sleep, then it’s only going to be memories, nightmares, of traitors and TNT and tight rooms and Tommy, getting hurt again. Wilbur wishes he protected him better.

‘ _You still can.’_

Oh, that’s right. His head is very noisy recently. The bombs like to whisper now, over their constant roaring and it’s actually rather polite, their helpful ideas. Wilbur’s begun to feel a bit like a fuse himself, slowly burning, running out of time before he himself goes up in flames. He wonders if he can find a way to protect Tommy before he does.

Then he blinks.

Of course he can. It’s what the bombs have been hissing since he ran away to a hole in the ground, the wall, the hole filled with very dark corners like the one he’s in now.

Wilbur stands, staring blankly at the floor. His white shirt with the ruffled collar is bright in the darkness, and hasn’t worn that torn blue coat since he came here. It’s still stained with his blood. He doesn’t want to wear it, even if it were clean.

“I could blow all it up.”

His voice is very loud in the silent room.

“I could save Tommy from L’Manberg.”

Because L’Manberg, Wilbur realizes as if a bomb had gone off and cleared away all thoughts that had blocked this one out, L’Manberg itself is the reason for all the fighting. If he and Tommy get rid of Schlatt, there’s only George, then Quackity, and whoever wants to toss their hand in for a sliver of fake, idealized power. A never ending stream of war.

“L'Manberg was supposed to be free of fighting. No weapons, just words. And look how that worked out.”

Their blood and others had spilled on that land, sunk to the roots of every tree and in the depths of the ocean around it.

Wilbur wraps his arms around himself and shudders.

“I’ve got to blow it up.”

He knows he’ll be seen as a villain, but he can’t very well convince everyone to see it his way. Tommy might follow and help if he thinks Wilbur’s trying to hurt anyone, so that’s what he’ll say. But Wilbur’s saving them. He’s saving them from having something to fight over, saving Tommy, and Tubbo, Fundy, Eret, and Niki, even Schlatt himself from everything that will follow. Even if someone is caught in the crossfire.

“I’ll do it.”

The bombs in his head roar happily and Wilbur walks to his satchel of clothing he hadn’t bothered to go through since he got here. He drops to his knees and rummages around until he finds a soft, worn trench coat and black turtleneck, changes, and heads outside to plan.

Plan, because Wilbur’s not a wildfire, he’s a slow burning fuse.  
  


* * *

  
  
Wilbur never really expected Dream to almost refute him. The man with the mask kept faltering as Wilbur had begged in that reverently mad tone, hesitating just slightly enough for Wilbur to notice. But he had given in, in the end, and Wilbur had took that stack of TNT numbly in his hands and stowed it in an ender chest. And before that, he had rambled a bunch of vitriolic bullshit, a poorly acted spiel of faux venom and grim determination to try and convince Tommy to leave him, run away, stay safe, but after all of it, Tommy has stayed.

  
  
Wilbur truly doesn’t know what he would’ve done without Tommy, and so he’s grateful, even if his right hand man thinks he’s become a villain, a monster.

  
  
Nights before the festival’s announcement, Wilbur had tried himself to make TNT, but his hands shook too much. The bombs hissed in his head and panic clawed at his throat, so he spilt the sand and gunpowder to the floor and dug his fingers into his scalp until they were quiet again. He couldn’t make the bombs, but he could take them from someone else.

  
  
Right now, Tommy and Techno were off doing- something, who knew what, but they weren’t around, and that’s what mattered.

  
So Wilbur is trying to hold the TNT in his hands. It’s awfully hard, just holding a stick of potential boom and fire and destruction between his trembling fingers, so he drops it. He can’t lay it under the city yet, the dynamite.

  
  
But the bombs are echoing in his ears and they must want one of their own, so he takes a single crate and deep in the woods, he takes out a stick. The fibrous cardboard wrapping tingles in his fingers, almost. Wilbur raises it closer to his face and his breath rattles and catches.

  
  
Just feeling the shape of past and future fire is so much to handle, but he has to hear those bombs out in the real world, get over the ones in his memories, to set off an entire country.

  
  
Wilbur slides the stick beside the others in the crate and pulls out a matchbox. His arms are shaking so much he can’t see the individual matches in the box, and he knows it’s not the cold. He has a coat on.

  
  
Once a single match is slipped into his gloved hand, Wilbur cannot move forwards another step. He cannot strike the match, set it alight, and he cannot burn the fuse. 

  
He slumps to his knees and tosses the match into the ground. Choking sobs are followed by the sting of fresh rising tears and Wilbur collapses onto the soft grass, face down.

  
  
He cries for awhile, but then a hissing in his ears rises like an angry cat, and he wipes his face, stands and rugs a beanie on his head.

  
  
The sky is clear and the stars are bright as he lays a circuit of red stone onto the ground and finishes it off with the placement of a pressure plate, sitting unassumingly on the forest floor. It’s very cold.

  
  
Wilbur knows he has to stop shuddering in the face of the bombs, but can’t, and so desperately hopes that exposure will make the panic fade.

  
  
He takes one step to the plate, two, then his legs don’t work right and it feels like a trap, a flashback to another time he ran somewhere only to be stabbed in the back. The wide open woods should not make him feel claustrophobic, but they do, and Wilbur falls to his knees once again with an angered, panicked cry. He slams his fist into the hardened, cold, dirt and pulls his nails down his face.

  
  
Wilbur breaks the pressure plate, and crafts a little button, so small and unassuming and still, waiting to be pressed, a simple movement. Something Wilbur can do. It is placed on a rock and wired to the single block of TNT.

  
  
Wilbur does not falter and with a crescendo of bombs in his head, taps the button so simply.

  
  
The resulting boom makes Wilbur gasp and cry, and he tears at his ears as if trying to remove them.

  
  
He leaves, and there’s a small visible dent in the ground. The explosions ring so much louder in his ears. They want more, and Wilbur knows he can’t hear that noise again.

* * *

  
  
  
Wilbur’s made a room dug out inside a hill in Manberg, that blood-poisoned land. It is small and dark and cramped. It is so cold. He sits in there, feeling trapped in his bones in the room destined to be filled with fire and smoke and burning and booms.

  
  
After lining the underside of the country with an entire stack of TNT, (still shuddering at every touch of it, crying and falling to the floor in panicked gasps) Wilbur gouged lyrics in the walls, a debauched anthem, a bastardized poem.

  
  
He makes himself stay in that room, singing a ghost of a song to pass the time. He really does need to get over that cramped, cold, clammy, cornered- CHOKING room from oh so long ago. So Wilbur sits on the floor a few hours and when he leaves the damned place he gasps on the fresh air and the outside.

  
  
He avoids close contact with Tommy and Techno, and while he knows Tommy’s been running off to Tubbo, Wilbur doesn’t know if Tommy knows that he told Tubbo about his plans. Which Tubbo had smiled and agreed with, a yes man, of sorts.

  
  
Wilbur finally tells Tubbo that he holds the cue, makes the choice to blow the fucking ground to smithereens, because Wilbur doesn’t want to have to. (have you ever even _heard_ the explosions they’re horrifying and taunting but he’s the only one who can hear-)

  
Tubbo will choose to keep Manberg around or make Wilbur save everyone in it, because Wilbur can’t make the choice on his own, even if he knows he’s the only one who can save them. He’s confident Tubbo will tell him to set it off, and he can follow orders, same as the bombs giving orders in his head. (Those same bombs are hissing ‘He won’t do it, because he and Tommy don’t want this do they, but they’ll back him _further_ into this corner he’s already flat against, they’d corner him and set him alight-‘)

  
  
Tubbo doesn’t end up saying the words, and Wilbur is numb. He doesn’t really know why. But then there’s a reason to feel numb and a different kind of boom that makes his head clamor in desperation, calling and joining the rest burning in his buzzing skull. Wilbur runs to the button, but can’t _find_ the room, mind too blurred with smoke and shock and invisible fires. 

  
He finds it a few hours later and is not able to press it. Hands shake, stomach sick, the stone walls glitter in torch light with those carved lyrics in jagged-mad handwriting. Wilbur would’ve been able to press this earlier. The bombs roar like an ocean in his skull, overpowering and making his head blank. He would’ve been able to. 

  
As Tommy, Techno, and the two new refugees arrive in Pogtopia, (that hole in the ground, hole in the wall, hole of _fucking nightmares_ and ground up dreams) Wilbur spits out more venom, silently begging for everyone there to fuck off, run away and be safe from him and his planned salvation.

  
  
Not one fucking leaves, and Wilbur sobs in his bed and bites his hand till it bleeds. His head is so loud. He’s cold.

  
  
The next night, he takes Tommy and newly traitorous Quackity to the cold room, the button. He’s not mad at Quackity for taking control of Manberg anymore. He’s not even angry at Schlatt. He knows it’s just the blood-stained land itself.

  
  
The pair corner him, hold weapons to his head, tell him to press that button, but Wilbur cannot. He can’t tell them that his hands will shake, his legs go weak, breath go ragged if he even tries to touch it. He can’t explain those voices, demands, whispers in his head dressed as fire and sticks of dynamite hiss. He can’t tell Tommy that he’s going to save them all but could not if Tommy was in the crossfire.

  
  
Wilbur breaks the button.

  
  
He places it back when the two leave.

  
  
Now Wilbur’s alone in that horrible, small, dark room lined with explosives. There’s ringing in his ears crying to blow up the fucking place, to start the fire, to let that fucked land burn away.

  
  
He can’t, not yet.

  
  
So he’s going to wait in the small stone room and let the explosions play in his head until he can. It’s only a matter of time. He shouldn’t have long yet.

  
  
He’s a been a slow burning fuse for a while now, and it’s much too cold.

  
  
And when he blows, he’ll go out with a

\ ╻ | ╻ /  
  
B O O M

/ ╹ | ╹ \

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and feel free to shout fun DreamSMP au ideas or whatever at me
> 
> o7
> 
> \----  
> Also; 
> 
> Should I write Dreamon possessed Vilbur content or post explosion society breakdown??? That is the question


End file.
